Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography Scott DeVeaux Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, No. 3, Literature of Jazz. Issue, (Autumn, 1991), pp. 525-560. Stable URL hitp:/flink jstor-org/sici?sici=0 148-6179% 28199 123% 2925%3A3%3C5 25%3ACTITING3E2.0.CO%3B2-0 Black American Literature Forum is currently published by St, Louis University ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at bhupulwww.jstororg/about/terms.hunl. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of « journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use ofthis work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at bhupuwww jstor-org/journals/stu hum Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission, JSTOR isan independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to ereating and preserving a digital achive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org. bupslhvwwjstor.org/ Tue Oct 10.03:30:19 2006Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography Scott DeVeaux I don’t know where Jazz Is going, Maybe Its going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. Itjust happens. “thetontous Monk 1 To judge from textbooks aimed at the college market, some- thing like an official history of jazz has taken hold in recent years. On these pages. for all its chaotic diversity of style and expression and for all the complexity of its social origins, Jazz 1s presented as a coherent whole, and its history as a skillfully contrived and easily comprehended narrative. After an obligatory nod to African origins and ragtime antecedents, the muste 1s shown to move through a succession of styles or periods. each with a conveniently distinctive label and time period: New Or- leans jazz up through the 1920s, swing in the 1930s, bebop in the 1940s, cool jazz and hard bop in the 1950s, free jazz and fusion in the 1960s. Details of emphasis vary. But from textbook to textbook, there is substantive agreement on the defining fea- tures of each style, the pantheon of great innovators, and the canon of recorded masterpieces. This official version of jazz history continues to gain ground through the burgeoning of jazz appreciation classes at universi- ties and colleges. It is both symptom and cause of the gradual acceptance of jazz, within the academy and in the society at large, as an art music—“America’s classical music,” in a fre- quently invoked phrase.! Such acceptance, most advocates of ‘Scott DeVeaux teaches music at the University of Virginia, He wishes to thank his colleague James Rubin forhis generous advice and insight in weiting, this article lack Amertan Laeraure Frum, Volume 28, Number (Pl 1991)526 Scott DeVeaux Jazz. agree, is long overdue. If at one time Jazz could be supported by the marketplace, or attributed to a nebulous (and Sdealized) vision of folk creativity, that time has long passed. Only by ac- quiring the prestige, the “cultural capital” (in Pierre Bourdieu's phrase) of an artistic tradition can the music hope to be heard, ‘and its practitioners receive the support commensurate with their training and accomplishments. The accepted historical nar- rative for jazz serves this purpose. It is a pedigree, showing contemporary Jazz to be not a fad or a mere popular music, subject to the whims of fashion, but an autonomous art of some ‘substance, the culmination of a long process of maturation that hhas in its own way recapitulated the evolutionary progress of Western art. The added twist is that this new American classical music openly acknowledges its debt not to Europe, but to Africa. There is a sense of triumphant reversal as the music of a formerly enslaved people is designated a “rare and valuable national ‘American treasure” by the Congress, and beamed overseas as a ‘weapon of the Cold War.2 The story of jazz, therefore, has an important political dimension, one that unfolds naturally in its telling. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane pro- vide powerful examples of black achievement and genius. Their exacting discipline cannot be easily marginalized, pace Adorno, as “mere” popular entertainment, or as the shadowy replication of European forms. The depth of tradition, reaching back in an unbroken continuum to the beginning of the century, belies at- tempts to portray African Americans as people without a past— hence the appeal of an unambiguous and convincing historical narrative: If the achievements that Jazz represents are to be impressed on present and future generations, the story must be told, and told well. For all its pedagogical utility. though, the conventional narra- tive of jazz history is a simpiification that begs as many ques- tions as it answers. For one thing, the story that moves so confidently at the outset from style to style falters as it ap- proaches the present. From the origins of jazz to bebop there is a straight line: but after bebop, the evolutionary lineage begins to dissolve into the inconclusive coexistence of many different, and in some cases mutually hostile, styles. “At the century's halfway mark,” complains one textbook, “the historical strand that linked contemporary jazz to its roots suddenly began to fray. The cohe- sive thread had been pulled apart in the ‘40s by the bebop musicians, and now every fiber was bent at a slightly different angle" (Tirro 291). Beginning with the 1950s and 1960s, theConstructing the Jazz Tradition 327 student of jazz history is confronted with a morass of terms —cool Jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, Third Stream, New Thing—, none of ‘which convincingly represents a consensus.# For the most recent decades, the most that writers of textbooks can manage is to ‘sketch out the contrasting directions pointed to by free jazz. and Jazz/rock fusion, implying to the impressionable student that an informed view embraces both, as it embraces all preceding styles, and that the future of Jazz is bound up with a pluralism that somehow reconciles these apparently irreconcilable trends.4 No one, apparently, has thought to ask whether the earlier “co- hesive thread” of narrative might mask similarly conflicting inter- pretations. ‘At the same time that jazz educators have struggled to bring order to jazz history, a controversy over the current state and future direction of jazz. has become noisily evident in the popular media. The terms of this debate pit so-called neoclassteists, who insist on the priority of tradition and draw their inspiration and identity from a sense of connectedness with the historical past, against both the continuous revolution of the avantgarde and the commercial orientation of fusion. At stake, If the rhetoric Is taken at face value, is nothing less than the musie’s survival. Some have argued, for example, that the neoclassicist move- ment, led by youthful celebrity Wynton Marsalis, has rescued Jazz from extinction. “Largely under his influence,” proclaimed a Time author in a recent cover story, 8 Jazz renaissance ts flowering on what was once barren soll. Straight- fahead jazz musie almost died in the 1970s as record companies em- braced the electronically enhanced jazz-pop amalgam known as fusion. Now a whole generation of prodigiously talented young musicians 1s, ‘going back to the roots, using acoustie instruments, playing recognlz- ‘able tunes and studying the styles of earlier jazzmen. (Saneton 66) Other critics counter that the triumph of a retrospective aes- thetic is in fact all the evidence one might need that jazz is dead all that is left to the current generation is the custodial function of preserving and periodically reviving glorious moments from the past. ‘The neoclassicists’ nostalgia for a Golden Age located ambigu- ously somewhere between the swing era and 1960s hard bop resonates curiously with issues that go back to the earliest days of jazz historiography. Marsalis and his followers have been called “latter-day moldy figs” (Santoro, “Miles” 17), a term that links them to critics of the 1930s and 40s who, by insisting on the priority of New Orleans-style jazz, earned themselves the reputation as defenders of an outdated and artifically static no- tion of what jazz is and can be. The countercharge that either (or528 Scott DeVeaux both) avant-garde or fusion constitutes a “wrong turn,” or a “dead end,” in the development of Jazz represents the opposing argument, of the same vintage: Any change that falls to preserve the essence of the music Is a corruption that no longer deserves to be considered jazz.6 ‘The difference in tone between these assessments—the rancor of the journalistic debate, and the platitudinous certainty of the classroom —disguises the extent to which certain underlying as- sumptions are shared. With the possible exception of those in the fusion camp (who are more often the targets of the debate than active participants in it), no one disputes the official version of the history.7 Its basic narrative shape and its value for a music that is routinely denied respect and institutional support are accepted virtually without question. The struggle is over pos- session of that history, and the legitimacy that it confers. More precisely, the struggle is over the act of definition that is pre- sumed to lie at the history's core; for it is an article of faith that some central essence named jazz remains constant throughout all the dramatic transformations that have resulted in modern- day jazz. ‘That essence ts ordinarily defined very vaguely; there is ample evidence from jazz folklore to suggest that musicians take a certain stubborn pride in the resistance of their art to critical ‘exegesis. (To the question What ts jazz? the apocryphal answer Is: “If you have to ask, you'll never know.”) But in the heat of debate, definition 1s a powerful weapon; and more often than not, such definitions define through exclusion. Much as the con- cept of purity 1s made more concrete by the threat of contamina- tion, what Jazz is not is far more vivid rhetorically than what it is. ‘Thus fusion is “not jazz” because, in its pursuit of commercial success, It has embraced certain musical traits—the use of elec- tric instruments, modern production techniques, and a rock- or funk-oriented rhythmic feeling— that violate the essential nature of jazz, The avant-garde, whatever its genetic connection to the modernism of 1940s bebop, is not jazz—or no longer Jazz—be- cause, in its pursult of novelty, it has recklessly abandoned the basics of form and structure, even African-American principles like “swing.” And the neoclassicist stance {s Irrelevant, and po- tentially harmful, to the growth of jazz because it makes a fetish of the past, failing to recognize that the essence of Jazz 1s the process of change itself. Defining jazz is a notoriously difficult proposition, but the task 4s easier if one bypasses the usual inventory of musical qualities or techniques, like improvisation or swing (since the more spe-Constructing the Jazz Tradition 529 cific or comprehensive such a list attempts to be, the more likely it is that exceptions will overwhelm the rule). More relevant are the boundaries within which historians, critics, and musicians have consistently situated the music. One such boundary, cer- tainly, Is ethnicity. Jazz is strongly Identified with African-Ameri- can culture, both in the narrow sense that its particular techniques ultimately derive from black American folk traditions, and in the broader sense that it is expressive of, and uniquely rooted in, the experience of black Americans. This raises import- ant questions at the edges—e.g., how the contributions of white musicians are to be treated and, at the other end of the spec- trum, where the boundary between Jazz and other Afriean-Ameri- can genres (such as blues, gospel, and R & B) ought to be drawn, But on the whole, ethnicity provides a core, a center of gravity for the narrative of jazz, and is one element that unites the several different kinds of narratives in use today. ‘An equally pervasive, if divisive, theme is economics —speeifie~ ally, the relationship of jazz to capitalism. Here, the definition is negative: Whether concelved of as art musie or folkt musle, Jazz. is consistently seen as something separate from the popular music industry. The stigmatization of “commercialism” as a disruptive or corrupting influence, and in any case as something external to the tradition, has a long history in writings on jazz. In the words of Rudi Blesh (writing in 1946), Commercialism (s} @ cheapentng and deteriorate force, a species of murder perpetrated on a wonderful muste by whites and ky dose ms- ulded negroes who, for one or anther reason, choose to be accom pllces to dhe deed... Commercialism is a Ung not only hostile, Dut fatal to Jaze) (11-12) Such language was particularly popular with defenders of New Orleans-style jazz who, like Blesh, narrowly identified the music with a romanticized notion of folk culture. But the same con- demnatory fervor could be heard from proponents of bebop in the 19408: ‘The story of bop, like that of swing before it, lke the stortes of Jazz and. ragtime before that, has been one of constant struggle against the strietions imposed on all progressive thought in an art that has been ‘commercialized to the point of prostitution. (Feather, Inside 45) Bebop Is the muste of revolt: revolt against big bands, arrangers. . «Tin Pan Alley—against commercialized music in general. It reasserts the individuality of the jazz musician . ... (Russell 202) ‘These attitudes survive with undiminished force in recent at- tacks on fusion, which imply a conception of Jazz as a music Independent of commercial demands that is in continuous con- flict with the economic imperatives of twentieth-century America,530 ‘Scott DeVeaux Agoraphobia, fear of the marketplace, is problematic enough in artistic genres that have actually achieved, or inherited, some degree of economic autonomy. It is all the more remarkable for Jazz—a musie that has developed largely within the framework of modern mass market capitalism—to be construed within the in- flexible dialectic of “commercial” versus “artistic,” with all virtue centered in the latter. The virulence with which these opinions are expressed gives a good idea how much energy was required to formulate this position in the first place, and how difficult it 1s to maintain. This ts not to say that there is not an exploitative aspect to the relationship between capitalist institutions and jazz musicians, especially when the effects of racial discrimination on the ability of black musicians to compete fairly are factored in. But jazz is kept separate from the marketplace only by demoniz~ ing the economic system that allows musicians to survive—and from this demon there is no escape. Wynton Marsalis may pride himself on his refusal to “sell out,” but that aura of artistic purity is an indisputable component of his commercial appeal Issues of ethnicity and economics define jazz as an opposi- tional discourse: the music of an oppressed minority culture, tainted by its association with commercial entertainment in a society that reserves its greatest respect for art that is carefully removed from daily life. The escape from marginalization comes only from a self-definition that emphasizes its universality and its autonomy. The “Jazz tradition” reifles the music, insisting that there is an overarching category called jazz, encompassing mu- sies of divergent styles and sensibilities. These musics must be understood not as isolated expressions of particular times or places, but in an organic relationship, as branches of a tree to the trunk. The essence of jazz, in other words, lies not in any one style, or any one cultural or historical context, but in that which Inks all these things together into a seamless continuum. Jazz is what it Is because it is a culmination of all that has come before. Without the sense of depth that only a narrative can provide, jazz would be literally rootless, indistinguishable from a varlety of other “popular” genres that combine virtuosity and craftsmanship with dance rhythms. Its claim to being not only distinct, but elevated above other indigenous forms (“America’s classical music’), is in large part dependent on the idea of an evolutionary progression reaching back to the beginning of the century. Again and again, present-day musicians, whether neo- classicist or avant-garde, Invoke the past, keeping before the public’s eye the idea that musics as diverse as those of KingConstructing the Jazz Tradition 531 Oliver and the Art Ensemble of Chicago are in some fundamental sense the same mustc.8 ‘Those who subscribe to an essentialist notion of jazz history (and there are few who do not) take all of this for granted. But ‘even a glance at Jazz historiography makes it clear that the idea of the “jazz tradition” is a construction of relatively recent vin- tage, an overarching narrative that has crowded out other posst- ble interpretations of the complicated and variegated cultural phenomena that we cluster under the umbrella Jazz. Nor is this ‘simply an academic complaint: The crisis of the current Jazz ‘scene is less a function of the state of the music (jazz has, in many ways, never been better supported or appreciated) than of an anxiety arising from the inadequacy of existing historical frameworks to explain it. The remainder of this essay will show how the concept of the jazz tradition came to be, what ideas it displaced along the way (and at what cost), what contradictions it contains, and its uses for describing and influencing the music of the present and future. In conclusion, I will try to indicate ways in which the narrative of the jazz tradition might be com- plemented by other kinds of research, In the earliest writings on jazz, historical narrative only grad- ually emerged from criticism. The most important full-scale study of jazz, Hugues Panassié’s 1934 Le jazz hot (translated and widely disseminated on this side of the Atlantic as Hot Jazz in 1936) was primarily critical in its approach. As befits a work written in Europe, it begins with a lengthy explication of the qualities that distinguish Jazz from European music: swing, im- provisation, repertory, and so forth. Just as important, however, was Panassié’s choosing to distinguish between “hot jazz” and other kinds of music called jazz (‘sweet,” “symphonic’) that occu- pied so much attention during the jazz age. In so doing, Panassié contributed to the process by which a catch phrase of consider- able vagueness, indiscriminately applied to all kinds of popular ‘song and dance music of the 1920s, came to be appropriated (come might say reclaimed) as a term for a music the aesthetic boundaries of which could be set with some precision. And in- deed, the remainder of the book is primarily concerned with Panassié's notoriously fine, often supercilious distinctions (e.g.. trumpeter Red Allen's “style is feverish, occasionally intemperate, and this is hardly acceptable” [76)), separating the “authentic” from the “false.”532 ‘Scott DeVeaux History per se plays a decidedly subsidiary role in Panassié scheme. And his distance from the scene (Panassié’s acquaint- ance with jazz came solely from recordings) forced him to fall back on a dubious secondary literature, some of which is bizarre in its remove from reality; it leads him, for example, to describe “St. Louls Blues” and “Memphis Blues” as work songs passed along by banjo-strumming fathers to their children, “a national repertory which all American Negroes know and respect just as we revere our old French songs" (26). Such distortions aside, a sense of historical development is nevertheless an indispensable framework for his aesthetics. According to Panasslé, it Is not until 1926 that jazz “attained its stable form, . . . ceased to falter and became a definite, balanced musical form’ (38). Prior to that time, the music was characterized by an upward arc from the “chaos” of the ur-styles of New Orleans through the agency of musicians like Louis Armstrong, the “greatest of all hot musi- cians" who “brought hot style to a peak” (27). Not until this process had been fulfilled, not only for the music as a whole but also for musicians individually (Coleman Hawkins's style was “the culmination of a progressive evolution” (101)), could eriti- cism proper begin. For Panassié, the history of jazz was necessarily abstract, a narrative to be deduced from the evidence of recordings and supported by shadowy speculation. In America, by contrast, that history was more concrete. Although still remote, it could be traced in the urban topography of New Orleans and Chicago. in the memory of those who listened to it, and, above all. in the direct testimony of those wh> created it. The impetus for histori- cal research, exemplified by the landmark 1939 book Jazzmen, was essentially biographical. In the preface to Jazzmen, the edi- tors, Charles Edward Smith and Frederic Ramsey, Jr., define their position as something separate from, and complementary to, the critical orientation of Panassié: Its the musiclans, the creators of jazz, who have actually been most elected while erlical battles have been fought... This book has attempted to fil the gaps left by the crities who, chieily concerned with thetr appraisal of the muste, have forgotten the musictans. (xil-xit) ‘There is very little by way of explicit or formal argument in the highly anecdotal narrative of Jazzmen. But if, as Hayden White suggests, explanation in history may be conveyed through “emplotment”—the kind of story'told (White 7-11)—, then these biographical accounts reveal a great deal about the attitudes of those who wrote them. Of White's archetypal “modes” of narra- tive, the one most consistently and vividly represented in Jazz-Constructing the Jazz Tradition 533 men ts the Tragic. And indeed, many of the life stories are tragic. Buddy Bolden, the charismatic, myth-enshrouded “first man of Jazz," who spent the last twenty-four years of his life in a mental institution; King Oliver, reduced at the end to managing a seedy. pool hall in Savannah; Bix Beiderbecke, the prototypical white Jazz rebel, doomed by his association with “Negro” music and ‘caught ina self-destructive cycle of alcohol and frustrated ambi- tion—in Jazzmen, all share the experience (or the ideal) of New Orleans as a Golden Age, and fight a subsequent losing battle against the combined forces of racism, commercial exploitation, and the disdain of the cultural establishment. The shuttering of Storyville in 1917 figures as an expulsion from Paradise that sets the tragedy in motion, and the onset of the Depression is a final act that grinds our heroes under the heel of an uncaring society. “What's the use?” lamented the clarinetist Frank Teschemacher (whose own fate was to fall from a speeding car in New York City in 1932). “You knock yourself out making a great new music for people, and they treat you like some kind of plague or blight, like you were offering them leprosy instead of art” (qtd, in Mezzrow 110). But not all stories could be configured this way. Some musi- ‘clans, like Armstrong and Ellington, never suffered a decline and fall. Still others, like Benny Goodman, passed through the nadir of the Depression only to reemerge triumphant, successful, and admired beyond all expectation in the breakthrough of jazz-ori- ented dance orchestras into the popular mainstream during the “Swing Era” of the middle and late 1930s. The proper mode for such stories would seem to be not Tragedy but Romance: “the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over dark- ness” (White 9). And indeed, this has become the dominant mode of storytelling for Jazz, both for Individuals and for the idiom as a whole. Still, contemporary advocates for jazz were troubled by the transformation. On the one hand, the general enthusiasm for swing did not necessarily translate into appreciation for, or even awareness of, the jazz that stemmed from New Orleans. (Indeed, the very name swing emphasized its differences from the now old-fashioned jazz of the 1920s.) On the other hand, swing brought both a new musical language and a new economic basis, for the music which threatened to make the earlier style obso- lete. The former represented opportunity, a chance to proselytize on an unprecedented scale. The latter represented danger, the possibility of being seduced by commercial success into aban- doning the essential qualities of the music.534 Scott DeVeaux Many were quick to assert that Jazz and swing were essentially the same genre. Significantly, critics like Panassié had earlier embraced both small-combo jazz and the early “big bands” of Ellington and Henderson, seeing in the latter category the “hot, concept” expressed through an orchestral medium (Hot Jazz 165). This enabled writers to strike a rhetorical stance welcoming the newcomers to the idiom and congratulating them on their good taste, while making it clear that a deeper, more mature appreciation of the music lay in an exploration of its past (and not incidentally, in the passage from popular white musicians to their more authentic black forebears). “The present interest in swing music, unfortunately, is a microscopic one,” wrote Paul Eduard Miller in 1937. “Not so for the initiate: he looks upon swing music as a fad, and prefers to take a telescopic, long-range view of hot Jazz" Roots” 5). More than anything, this line of argument strengthened historical narrative as an avenue for un- derstanding jazz. But constructing a suitable narrative foundered on the ques- tion of whether the music had in fact changed. One view was presented forcefully by Winthrop Sargeant in Jazz: Hot and Hy- brid. “There was nothing new about hot jazz in 1935,” he wrote In the first chapter. Its apparently novel features were “merely the result of changes in formula designed to create a public demand for dance bands, sheet music, phonograph records, or other products of the commercial music industry” (15-16). After the lengthy explication of technical features of jazz that com- prises the bulk of the book, Sargeant concludes that jazz in fact lacks an historical dimensior ‘One of the most striking features of Jazz as compared with art muste 1s its lack of evolutionary development. Aside from a few minor changes of fashion, tts history shows no technical evolution whatever. . . . Jazz today remains essentially the same kind of music t was in 1900. (259) Sargeant attributes the lack of development in jazz to its roots in—indeed, virtual identity with—folk music, “the original primi- tive music of the American Negro.” But his is a flawed view of folk culture that anachronistically characterizes the increasingly urban black community of mid-century America as a “peasant proletariat” and considers the community's cultural products to be primitive expressions Incapable of further development. Folk elements, according to this view, do not change—cannot change. ‘They may only be imitated and exploited by the popular music industry. Under pressure from society, however benignly in- tended, they may disappear altogether. Looking ahead, he notes: “It is not at all unlikely that the education of the mass of Ameri-Constructing the Jazz Tradition 535 can Negroes will sound the death knell of the type of primitive Jazz that the aesthetes most admire” (264) ‘This static, anti-developmental, anti-modernist view underlies much of the writing on jazz of the 1930s and 1940s. “You can't improve on the old boys,” seconded George Avakian in a 1939 article entitled “Where is Jazz Going?” “Jazz s Jazz; it can't be modernized or streamlined” (9). The continued presence on the Jazz scene of such august figures as Armstrong and Sidney Bechet; the success of jazz researchers in uncovering so much of the historical context for the origins of the music; the startling public acceptance of such authentically and previously neglected “folk” idioms as boogie-woogie; the dramatic resurrection of Bunk Johnson, providing a Romantic story of triumph over ad- versity to equal the superficial triumphs of the swing stars—all reinforced a view in which the thrust of jazz history was to restore and strengthen the “original” muste.9 Swing’s purpose would be admirably fulfilled if, after leading the uninitiated to the “real jazz,” it would simply wither away. ‘The most vociferous proponent of this view was Panassié, in his 1942 book The Real Jazz. In this volume, jazz is now specific- ally defined as “the spontaneous urge of a whole people” (7), a “primitive” African-American folk expression superior by virtue of its emotional directness to the tired intricacies of European art. ‘Over this “natural, spontaneous song” (6) there is no possibility of improvement. Indeed, the very notion of progress is inherently destructive, seducing musicians from their true calling: ‘These mustelans who had Infallibly played in a perfect manner, and had never digressed for an instant from the pure tradition of thelr art as long, as they blindly followed thelr instinct, now rejected their tradition and began to reason and to “improve” thelr muste. Of course they fell into ‘innumerable errors. (54) ‘Swing was, in a sense, “more dangerous” than earlier attempts to improve Jazz, such as the symphonic Jazz of Paul Whiteman, “because it came much closer to the real jazz and easily misled the uninitiated” (65). Still, metaphors of growth and evolution underlie even the most conservative stances. Panassié, for instance, was guided by a deep-rooted inclination to view art as a growing, developing organism. Small-group jazz in Chicago “evolved little by little and developed in an excellent manner” (49); Armstrong's career is divided into several “periods,” “for a musician who is also a creator never ceases to evolve during his musical career” (69-70) Most telling is Panassié’s evaluation of the black swing bands, already included as “hot jazz” in his 1934 book. “The growth of536 ‘Scott DeVeaux such orchestras as Jimmy [sic] Lunceford’s, Count Basie’s, and Duke Ellington's,” he wrote eight years later, “Is the most re- markable event in the recent history of jazz. These orchestras have contributed a great deal in maintaining jazz's vitality, and through them new blood has been infused into Jazz” (235). His anti-progress stance represents not so much ‘@ disbelief in the possibility of development as a pessimistic feeling that develop- ment beyond a certain point inevitably leads to decay and deca- dence. Having once matured to a “balanced,” “classic” state, jazz can no longer “progress.” The best that one can hope s that the mature stage can be sustained and preserved for as long as possible. And this is made more difficult when black musicians “must submit to the corruption of an outrageous commercialism, as well as to the conventional musical notions of the white man and the current theories about necessary progress.” The end result is that “jazz will be transformed little by little, until it becomes an entirely different kind of music” (236). Even Rudi Blesh, who in his 1946 Shining Trumpets is con- temptuous of the “illusion of progress” in the arts, and provides a chart to show the “deformations of Negro Jazz” (to be used in identifying those “deceptive elements . . . which, borrowed from Jazz, make the present-day commercial swing falsely seem an- other form of that music” [7)), showed himself to be a firm be- ever in evolution, less pessimistic in fact than Panassié about the prospects for growth and development. “The history of Jazz has been a short one,” Blesh writes, “a span of development and fruition remarkably compressed in time” (14); “pure jazz” emerges at “its highest point of evolution” (16). The obstacles to further development are, once again, external: misconceptions fostered by “commercial interests.” Once these obstacles are re- moved, Blesh speculates hopefully, “can progress resume, undis- torted and unvitiated, from that point?” (16) ‘The extent to which Blesh and Panassié already subscribed a dynamic view of jazz history made it difficult for them to hold a position against the advocates of swing in the debates that peri- odically flared up in the jazz press of the 1940s. Their opponents simply accepted swing as the natural, certainly desirable, and perhaps inevitable result of development. Whereas the New Or- leans purists viewed the transformation with suspicion and mis- giving, others were optimistic and openly enthusiastic. “The truth happens to be that countless musicians have used the groundwork laid by the Armstrongs and Beiderbeckes and have built up from those fine foundations,” argued Leonard Feather on the pages of Esquire in 1944, “Never before has any branch ofConstructing the Jazz Tradition 5837 music made such rapid progress” Jazz” 129). Moreover, as Feather delighted in demonstrating, the musicians themselves, more often than not, subscribed to this idea of progress, usually measured in increased technical and harmonic sophistication.10 In any case, such optimism and enthusiasm fit the mood of the coun- try, which was inclined to expect progress in its popular arts as in any other national exercise of Ingenuity and skill. “Surely there can be an improvement over a period of twenty years,” Paul Eduard Miller asserted in 1945, “and if there isn't, then the future of jazz as, an art form is precariously balanced” (‘Rhythm” 86). Nothing infuriated the conservatives more than this line of argument, for it carried the obvious implication that the music of the 1920s, far from representing the Idiom in its “classic,” ma~ ture stage, was in fact an awkward beginning, the first phase of a dynamic evolution that inevitably rendered the earliest jazz efforts obsolete. Indeed, in the heat of argument, the idea of progress could be turned quite pointedly against the “master- pieces” of early jazz: “The expertenced and discerning Jazz listener, whose ears are attuned to more advanced Ideas tn orchestration. and improvisation, laughs at the attempts to deify the badly dated relies of the 1920s, lay you ean listen to each of the five trumpet players tn Lionel Hampton's band, and every one of them will take a chorus which, had it been discovered on some obscure old record, would be hailed as genius by the sJelly Roll network. (eather, “Jazz” 129) One ought not to exaggerate the significance of this sectarian dispute, however. Both sides faced the same obstacles—the in- difference and ignorance of the general public, the hostility of “commercial interests” and the cultural establishment~and knew at heart that what they had In common outweighed thelr differences. The concept of a jazz tradition with an honorable past and a hopeful future began to emerge as a useful compro- mise, with the term jazz now covering both the original “hot jazz” of the 1920s and the swing of the 1930s. In principle, it bound together enthusiasts of different persuasions and allowed them to make a common front against outsiders. Thus, Jazzmen in- cluded a chapter on “Hot Jazz Today” that spoke warmly of such modernists as Art Tatum, Chick Webb, and Andy Kirk. On the other side of the fence, Down Beat, a periodical aimed at the modern swing musician, carried articles providing historical per- spective, and persuaded many to accept and even admire earlier styles.1! In 1944 another trade periodical, Metronome, canvassed ten well-known musicians to support its conclusion that there was “absolutely no dividing line between swing and Jazz” (Ulanov and Feather 22-23).